A bit more…

My Projects

Sarah is a service designer, graduated from Glasgow School of Art. She is the first winner of the Medici service design award. Sarah's passion is for improving public services and using design to create social change. Below is a few projects she has worked on

Well its taken me a long time to write this post, the last couple of days have been hetic.

Basically, my idea that I put forward won Sicamp. My idea was extremely back of the envelope, based on experiences of my own and especially influenced by the recent story of a friend…I put forward:

“Recently after a friends flat was broken into I’ve had the experience of losing confidence in the police and not being kept informed about what is happening on the case. Let’s have police feedback and case updates on the web. Let’s get police telling and showing us what they’re doing. Let’s use new technologies to report crimes. Let us know what’s happening in our community and where our police officers are.”

It was a mash of many ideas but what I really wanted to take forward, and Sicamp realised was a way to feedback your opinions to the police, resulting in a better run police service that was influenced directly by the public experience.

SIcamp brings together designers, business brains, developers, coders and creative thinkers to work on ideas in a very short space of time and present to a team of investors and sponsors including first port, big lottery fund, 4ip, Skills development scotland and more.

Because I graduated on the Friday, I missed the first meet on Friday but managed to catch everyone at the pub and convince some fellow sicampers to join the mypolice team since I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to help me.

Luckily on Saturday morning I showed up and I had myself a team of 8 other individuals who all seemed as passionate about the idea as much as I was. My team included 38minuter and programmer Kate Ho, Jen Davies, fellow GSA Grad James Brown, FutureGov’s Carrie Bishop, Olivier Raynault, and Estonia’s Tony Bowden, Charloote Mc Donald and Gayle Rice (who I am going to make get a twitter account!!!)

The point of the weekend was to develop the idea including the need for it, a business plan, future thinking and to code it so it would ‘work’ on the internet. As I’m a designer, I wanted to make sure our idea was concrete then to develop the code. I think as a group we tackled a tricky and difficult subject really well by taking different users through the site and created storyboards of how this might work, and what could be the downfalls of the site if it was misused.

I’m really excited to have won though, its an idea I’m really passionite about and have managed to free up some of my time this summer so I’m committed to taking this forward. I’d like to thank everyone who has got in touch this week to congratulate us and offer help, I’m sure we are going to need it.

If you’d like to find out more about us, you can sign up for a news letter at our site mypolice.org or follow our progress on our blog

And so now I’m waiting for our group to turn up at the arches, I’m a little early but rather keen and excited to plan out mypolice’s future. What’s next for us? Well we’re going backwards a little to research the police and how they operate and handle complaints, visiting stations. We’ll also be getting in touch with the public so if you’re part of a local community group, let us know! We’ll be visiting support organisations like the Samaritans and Crimestoppers and pulling together this information to design the site so it meets the needs of both the police and the public.

On top of the timelapse I took for the degree show, I filmed us clearing out our studios and building the show. The first minute or so is photos of us during the year but after is a time lapse recording taken over about 5 or 6 days of our hard work.

Last night we had the family and friends night at the Glasgow School of Art and we became the graduating students! Can’t believe it all went so fast, 4 years have gone!

So I am now a graduate (well officially next Friday) of the GSA. Bdes hons in Product Design. I also managed to pick up the first ever Medici service design medal for my Post Office project. I’ll be returning for a masters in September and working with Skills Development Scotland to research and work on projects to do with design thinking/service design within a public sector organisation.

I’m also going to London very soon to work with Think Public for a wee while so if anyone is in the London area around July get in touch, then I’ll be working with the Informatics Forum (who I met during the wii sign project) and perhaps be working with the NHS and how Specks can be used in certain scenarios and how to make their technology feel transparent.

Very excited for all this, but for now, It is time to take a long holiday. Ciao!

Well this time next week I will probably be enjoying a few drinks with my friends from the course. Our degree show is exactly one week ago, when we open the doors at 6pm to clients and those in the art and design community. I still cannot believe how fast 4 years have gone but I look forward to the future and I’m excited about getting involved in real projects.

Which brings round that all so difficult issue of the business card! After much thought, I came up with this. A Lego version of me in my studio. I figured whats sums me up is similar to Lego: playful but structured. As a designer I like to have fun, I like to be creative, no idea is too silly, at the same time I must remain professional, realistic and have the ability to facilitate projects in a focused and structured manner. Here is the photo shoot from today;

I was told to be quiet about this until they released the results today, but my idea for an online public service focusing on the police was chosen. I’m really excited about it, I’ve been thinking about this for rather a long time but never had the time to really push it forward.

Its an open idea at the moment, really just a brief concept but I’m looking forward to working on it with others at the weekend.